Geek Daily

It can be depressing reading the news these days. Everyday, it seems, more companies are announcing layoffs and more people are out of work. IBM even annocunced recently that they are offering to move laidoff workers to India, China, and Brazil to fill market demands. AKA they laid you off to outsource your job to cheaper countries. The moved workers will expect to receive salaries comparable with that of local workers. Ouch!

With the idea of job security pretty much non-existant, what can you do to help insulate yourself from these tough economic times?

Now is a perfect time to work for yourself as a freelance consultant. Yes it is! Here is why.

3 Reasons You Should Consider Becoming A Freelance Consultant

1. Even though companies are laying people off, the jobs still need to get done. Big companies may outsource to other countries but small to medium businesses will likely look to local consultants to fill the gaps they can’t afford to fill with full-time employees.

2. Your costs are relatively low. The costs to strike out on your own are pretty low. You can arm yourself with free and open source software to fill almost all your operational needs. I will do a post later on starting up a business using open source and free software. Health care will likely be your biggest expense.

3. Your time is your own. Imagine walking to the hardware store, eating lunch with your significant other, or playing soccer with your kids in the middle of the day! Well, as a freelancer you can do that. You set your work hours and you decide how much you need/want to work.

If you have been recently laid off or are frustrated with or feel trapped in your current job maybe making the jump to being a freelance consultant is something you should consider.

This is an area that I’ll expand on in future posts so make sure you grab the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter.

Lately I have been enjoying the Design Pattern series and my posts on becoming a bad developer and decreasing performance have been popular. I entend to expand on these areas meaning you will see more posts on programming principles and best practices some of which will take the more sarcastic and negative side to make the point. In addition to these I plan to try out a new kind of post. This will not be that frequent but I think it will be useful to you.

The Proposal

Occasionally I am going to review a book or service that is relevant to programming, running a website, running your own business, or technology in general. You can take a look at the list of products I will be choosing from here. There will also be a few hanging around on the right side bar as well.

How To Get It Free

The best part of these reviews is that you will easily be able to get these books and services for free. That’s right. These will not be paid reviews so they are my honest opinions. I will have personally used these products so I won’t promote anything that is crap and that I wouldn’t use myself.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do get paid for qualified leads. Meaning, if you decide you want to give the service or book a try, you fill out a small form before you receive the product. If you qualify, I get paid a couple bucks.

I hope that you will find these reviews useful.